§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

If The Facts Don’t Support You, Just Make It Up

Compromise And The Constitution

The 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia could not have produced our Constitution without a long string of compromises among the sovereign states, some of which had populations that dwarfed others, and all of which had different economic and social interests.

That is a lesson for today’s acrimonious political maneuvering that seems likely to result in a government shutdown. But compromise is a two-way affair.

Obama has adamantly, for nearly five years, refused to negotiate in good faith with Republicans. For him compromise is out of the question. Instead he has deliberately goaded Republicans for two years, aiming for a government shutdown, which he believes will enable the Democrat/Socialist Party to regain control of the House of Representatives. Thereafter, with Nancy Pelosi again running the House of Representatives, Obama proposes to ignore any political views other than the secular religious ideology of socialism.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Al Gore Shivers In The Cold Wind Of Truth

Climate science is a legitimate field of inquiry when it is acknowledged that climate scientists today really understand very little about the extraordinarily complex nature of earth’s climate. Latest revelations in the growing avalanche of real evidence make clear that the secular religion of man-made global warming, now called climate change, is emphatically not science.

Everyone should understand that there are huge costs in decreased standards of living and higher unemployment arising from the proposed and already implemented regulations based on belief in man-made climate change. The UK and continental Europe, Germany in particular, are staggering under large increases in energy costs. Costs have gone so high that many households in the UK are compelled to go without heat in the winter. German industry is shutting down plants or moving them overseas to less regulated locations. In the United States Obama’s war on the coal industry is clobbering areas already suffering poverty conditions. Many millions of taxpayer dollars are being wasted on entirely uneconomic green power and green automobile projects. Blocking the pipeline from Canada has cost thousands of jobs. In western New York where I live, shutting down fracking has blocked our participation in creation of the thousands of jobs that have come into existence in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Adherents to the belief in man-made climate change are now endeavoring to block the resurgence of natural gas production, one of the greatest forces for revitalization of American industry (and the creation of millions of jobs).

At bottom the secular religion of man-made climate change is simply an appendage to the liberal-progressive-socialist lust to regiment and to control every activity of every individual in the nation. The Federal government already controls the nation’s financial sector as effectively as if it owned it. Add the nation’s energy to its control and we have Henri de Saint-Simon’s original conception of social engineering in the socialist state. Only disinterested public experts, he preached, have the knowledge and skill to administer the whole of society to achieve social justice.

As Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign advisor Stuart Chase, who coined the term New Deal, stated the liberal-progressive lust for power:

“The drive of collectivism leads toward control from the top. ... At bottom the conception of economic planning is science supervising a people’s housekeeping. ... And so the final idea of a National Planning Board emerges; ... a group which knows the past, can give capable advice as to the present, and sees into the future, especially the technological future. ... The real work, the real thought, the real action must come from the technicians: that class most able, most clear-headed of all in American life, hitherto only half utilized in technical detail and in college class rooms. ... This is a long-swing project we are starting, longer than the secular trend; longer than the industrial revolution itself. Errors will be made; methods will be tried out and discarded; but the principle of control from the top must go on.”

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Focus On Feckless Foreign Policy

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Who Really Benefits From Government Regulations and Spending?

I have written often over the past four years that the only real beneficiary of the Fed’s massive creation of phony dollars through its quantitative-easement monetary policy is, not the general public, but the financial sector, especially the stock market.

Quantitative easement, either because Keynesian economists ignore the historical record, or because the Fed’s real intention was to centralize control of the entire financial sector, was falsely sold to the public as the only way to get consumers spending more (by adding to their already too heavy credit-card debt) and thus to revive the GDP and re-employ the millions who lost their jobs in the 2007-2008 economic melt down.

Ronald Reagan said that the closest thing on this earth to immortality is government spending programs. Robert Higgs (below) explains why that is so, contending that all government spending and regulatory programs are based on ulterior motives. Whether those programs effectively promote their announced aim is immaterial. What counts is the benefit derived by one special-interest group or another.

My version is that government programs are not intended to be effective, measured by personal or business criteria. The aims are to employ as many people as possible, for as long as possible, at the greatest imaginable cost. Which is to say the point for politicians is to buy votes and remain in office.

Savings vs. Borrowing

Fed chairman Bernanke, just months before the implosion of our financial system in 2007-08, declared that the problem confronting the United States and the world was excessive savings and not enough consumption. What is now blindingly obvious is that the problem was the exact opposite: individuals and governments had gone heavily into debt, far beyond their capacity to service it. The EU, for example, has lurched from crisis to crisis, trying to prop up member nations that had floated their economies on debt greatly in excess of their capacity to produce goods and services of sufficient market value to handle those debts.

The Forbes article linked below should have narrowed its aim to Keynesian and neo-Keynesian economists, who believe that the only route to recovery from an economic recession is going further into debt and using the proceeds to consume even more goods and services. The cause of our current, prolonged recession was the Fed’s Keynesian policy of creating excessive amounts of fiat money that enabled and encouraged financial institutions to over-lend to companies and individuals.

And, in 1930, a severe economic contraction began that economists did not see coming and did not know what to do about after it arrived. The period of economic distress lasted 12 years and was later named “The Great Depression.”

…And, in late 2007, a severe economic contraction began that economists did not see coming and did not know what to do about after it arrived. This period of economic distress has lasted almost six years to date. Let’s call it “The Pretty Good Depression.”

Let’s be blunt. Whatever economics is, it is not a science. Unlike physicists, who can predict an asteroid’s closest approach to earth within a few miles when it is still 100 million miles out in space, economists can’t accurately predict this quarter’s GDP. Indeed, they are still arguing among themselves about what “really” happened 83 years ago…

Avent then goes on to say:

“From the depression of the 1930s, economists learned that money matters, and that a contraction in the money supply can produce a painful downturn. From the inflation of the 1970s, economists learned that inflation is a monetary phenomenon, which can be controlled through the proper application of monetary policy. One has the sense that, although the world’s present disaster is coming—slowly, fitfully—to an end, central bankers are still quite a long way away from understanding how they failed, and how they might do better in the future.”

That year the race for President was a 4-way contest—Taft the Republican, Teddy Roosevelt the candidate of the Progressive Party, Wilson the Democrat, and Eugene Debs the Socialist.

The previous 4-way was 1860, the year Lincoln was elected. (Lincoln, Douglas, Bell, Breckinridge.) That was a turning point too. The election of 1860 settled the slavery question, the challenge that was beyond the reach of the Founders when they crafted the Constitution. The southerners of the Confederacy rejected the Declaration’s self-evident truths (especially “Jefferson’s folly” that all men are created equal) and made war on the Constitution. Lincoln, elected by less than a majority, saved the Union and preserved the Constitution.

In 1912 the Confederacy got its revenge. The rebel Southerners, essentially all Democrats, had failed to overturn the Constitution by force of arms. But Woodrow Wilson was a southerner and a segregationist who also rejected the principles of the Declaration and who was also an avowed foe of the Constitution, this time in the name of Progressivism. Wilson’s election put a Progressive in the Oval Office for the first time. It was not to be the last time.

Here is what Wilson had to say about the Constitution:

“Justly revered as our great Constitution is, it could be stripped off and thrown aside like a garment, and the nation would still stand forth in the living vestment of flesh and sinew, warm with the heart-blood of one people, ready to recreate constitutions and laws.”

Justly revered, but not by Wilson who was keen to throw it aside and start over.

And here he is on the philosophy of the Founders, as expressed in the Declaration:

“No doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle…”

1912 began the century-long march by the Progressive Democrats to re-write the Constitution (often by simply ignoring it) and to fundamentally transform America. Today the once-limited federal government is in charge of nearly everything—health care, mortgages, a mandatory and bankrupt retirement system for the citizenry, student loans, even street signs in New York City. (Yes, the feds forced N.Y. to spend badly-needed millions to replace all the street signs to meet new “federal standards.”)

Exactly one-half way through the century the Democrats added another de-stabilizing precedent to the mix. In 1960, America elected a charming, handsome playboy. Ike in the Oval Office was by his mere presence a powerful deterrent of America’s foes. Suddenly, that changed. Krushchev knew Kennedy was a playboy and believed Kennedy was a cream-puff. Kennedy felt the need to convince Krushchev that he was tough. That got us Vietnam.

In 2012, America re-elected another handsome celebrity President whose presence in the Oval Office does not deter America’s foes. Instead, it actually appears to embolden them. And thanks to Progressive policies, America is broke.

America has made some unwise choices in the past century. The only question—one which time will surely answer—is how great the cost is going to be.